Dabney defines southern liberalism over time

Dabney explains his political orientation as a southern liberal. His work with the Southern Regional Council (SRC) embodied a gradualist approach to race relations. He argues that the <cite>Brown</cite> ruling signaled a break from the older brand of moderate southern liberalism. Despite his liberal stance, Dabney contends that he was not ostracized, but was branded an idealist.

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with Virginius Dabney, June 10-13, 1975. Interview A-0311-1. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Text of the Excerpt

WILLIAM H. TURPIN:

Did you have any type of arrangement with John Stewart Bryan, who was
your publisher at that time?

VIRGINIUS DABNEY:

No, I didn't. You see, I was just a reporter on the
News-Leader, and I left in '28 and went to the
Times-Dispatch.

WILLIAM H. TURPIN:

O.K., the publisher there was . . .

VIRGINIUS DABNEY:

Was Charles P. Hasbrook.

WILLIAM H. TURPIN:

Did you have any type of arrangement of what he expected of you as an
editor, what your rights and responsibilities were, what your duties
would be, the extent of your determination of what the editorial page
should be, after 1936?

VIRGINIUS DABNEY:

After 1936, Hasbrook left and was succeeded by Mark Ethridge, who was
well known. He had been editor in Macon, Georgia and made a big
impression there and was then brought here from the Washington
Post. I don't know exactly what he was on the
Washington Post, something very special, but I don't
know what. They got him to come down to Richmond as publisher of the
Times-Dispatch. He didn't stay very long because Barry
Bingham on the Louisville Courrier-Journal lured him
there and put him in charge. We didn't have any particular understanding
about my position on issues. He was quite liberal and I was tending in
that direction— probably more than I am
now. Yet I sometimes wonder whether my position now is much less liberal
than it was then; at that time, the issues were so different, and what
seemed liberal in that era would be much less so today. Anyway, at that
time, I was regarded as decidedly liberal. I was involved in the
Southern Regional Council, which was trying to stir things up in the
South generally on labor, race, sharecroppers, and things like that.

DANIEL JORDAN:

I wonder if you might comment on your sort of overall philosophy of what
the editor should be and what the role of the editor is and then we
might move into the topic of liberalism, which is of course,
important.

VIRGINIUS DABNEY:

My feeling is that the editor ought to try to lead public opinion. Some
people say that you shouldn't expect to have any influence as an editor,
but it doesn't seem to me that that is a sound viewpoint. I may not have
had any influence, but I hoped to have some. When I was writing signed
articles every Sunday, I tried to, for example, influence public opinion
in behalf of Al Smith and against Herbert Hoover. I wrote on the strikes
in North Carolina textile mills and how the employers were beating up
and even shooting union organizers, which seemed to me to be pretty
outrageous. I wrote on prohibition a lot and the indefensible things
that were happening there. Prohibition agents were shooting people for
carrying whiskey in their cars. I didn't believe in prohibition anyway.
My father was a director of the Association Against the Prohibition
Amendment and that didn't go over well with some of the dry legislators
in the Virginia General Assembly, one of whom tried to get him fired
from the U. Va. faculty for being a director of the
Association Against the 18th Amendment. I think that an editor ought to
take a position and not just reflect what is happening. He should try to
be ahead of the public and mold the public opinion in a certain
direction, as he sees it.

DANIEL JORDAN:

Now, we mentioned souther liberalism and you wrote an important book on
liberalism in the South and were regarded as a southern liberal. I
wonder if we might move into that general topic and perhaps begin with a
sort of working definition of what liberalism in the South would be in
the 1930s and '40s.

VIRGINIUS DABNEY:

I think that a southern liberal at that time was in favor of doing
something about the rural South, getting some kind of better deal for
the sharecroppers, white or black, also try to change race relations
gradually. Everybody knew that it couldn't be done quickly, but we
wanted to move toward a better relationship between the races and a
better deal for the blacks. We felt that segregation was here to stay,
at least for the present. You couldn't even talk about abolishing
segregation at that time. I was not in favor of it and very few people
were, The Southern Regional Council was trying to bring about progress
for the Negroes within the "separate but equal"
formula. It became more and more obvious that there wasn't any equality.
As a practical matter, the schools, overall, were not equal, housing
conditions were not, the manner in which the streets were maintained in
the cities was altogether unequal. We tried for some years to see if we
could bring about changes so as to move substantially in the direction
of equality, but we just couldn't get many people to go along. Most
business people thought that we were stirring
things up unnecessarily. "Why don't you just shut up and let it
go away." was the attitude. We didn't think anything would ever
happen to improve matters substantially if we did shut up. There were
some Negro leaders who were very aware of the difficulties. In Richmond
there was Dr. Gordon B. Hancock, who was a Negro minister and a graduate
of Colgate and Harvard who had studied at Oxford. He was a very sane,
moderate man. He knew the difficulties that existed and realized that
you couldn't go headlong just trying to tear into everybody with a
meatax, as Mencken was doing— trying to force people to
change. You had to persuade them and show them the reasonableness of
what you were trying to do. The Southern Regional Council got just a
handful of white business and professional men and women who would
cooperate. One bank official and one lawyer worked with us, but by and
large, you just couldn't get most leading whites to go along. Colgate
Warder joined up and then a few ministers and newspaper editors. We made
little headway. Dr. Hancock made a quite significant speech at one point
in which he said, "It is important that the leadership on the
race issue and the leadership of the Negro race be in Atlanta rather
than in New York." He felt that if we kept it in Atlanta, we
could control the situation and move on gradually. But we couldn't get
enough people to see that' with the result that the NAACP in New York
began moving very much faster than we thought was wise and pushed
aggressively for the Supreme Court decision that came in '54. We were
hoping that we could bring the South along more rapidly and delay that
decision until we were more ready for it.

DANIEL JORDAN:

Is it possible to "type" a southern liberal in the '30s
and '40s? We are dealing with a small number of people, of course, but
what kind of person would have been in the southern liberal
movement?

VIRGINIUS DABNEY:

You mean the type of individual . . .

DANIEL JORDAN:

Or the names . . . well, both. I think that you covered some of the
principles, but I am interested in the types of individuals. There was a
handful of newspaper editors perhaps, or academic types?

VIRGINIUS DABNEY:

Well yes, those were two of the principal categories. Howard Odum was
one. Ralph McGill was one, Mark Ethridge . . . I'm trying to think of
some other individuals.

WILLIAM H. TURPIN:

Louis Jaffe. Didn't he win a Pulit zer Prize?

VIRGINIUS DABNEY:

Yes, he was one. I don't think that he was at that first conference in
Atlanta in '44. The Durham conference of blacks occurred in the fall of
'43 and they had issued a statement or manifesto asking for progress in
certain areas, but they didn't ask for integration. They specifically
stayed away from that. They wanted to work within the separate but equal
framework at that time.

DANIEL JORDAN:

I think that we will pick up the Southern Regional Council shortly, but
could you comment on the evolution of your own views. I think that you
said your father was on the conservative side. The Depression apparently
made an impression on you, Mencken made an impression on you, but how do
you account for your own liberal views at the time?

VIRGINIUS DABNEY:

I've been puzzling over that, Dan, and I am a little bewildered to know
myself. It seems to have been a gradual process. The textile strikes in
the South awakened me to the injustices in that area. Seeing the
conditions under which Negroes in Richmond lived and over the South, the
unbelieveable squalor and the conditions in the schools. The fact that
these black children were going to school in totally unsatisfactory
buildings with teachers who weren't really well
trained, and the children were having to by-pass white schools to go
miles to colored schools. The wage scales that were paid to domestics .
. . when I was young, I just never thought about that at all and even
when I was in college. But later on, it just seemed that they couldn't
possibly lead a decent life on these really ridiculous rates of pay.
There was no minimum wage, and they were simply paid what people were
accustomed to paying and had been paying for generations.
hat situation combined to gradually awaken me to
the fact that something ought to be done. The conditions in industry
were weighted heavily on the side of management. I joined the newspaper
guild before it affiliated with the CIO. It was just an organization of
newspaper reporters and newspaper people in the early '30s. We were
conscious of the fact that the pay of newspapermen was absolutely
preposterous. I remember that we got a star reporter from Birmingham,
one of the top men down there on the Birmingham News,
and paid him $28 a week. That was the sort of thing that was
going on. There was a two-week vacation if you didn't get sick. If you
got sick, you got no vacation. I got the measles one year and the pink
eye on top of it and I got no vacation at all.

WILLIAM H. TURPIN:

Well, Mr. Dabney, any one of these points that you are talking about that
you supported or opposed are things that are pretty traditionally
accepted in Virginia. Pretty traditionally accepted by the newspapers of
Virginia, the business community of Virginia. I'm talking about the
lower wages, the anti-labor thing, the anti-guild thing for example. How
could you support these things and work for what has to be considered an
establishment newspaper, the Times-Dispatch? How could
you support these things or fight against these things that you
have mentioned, when obviously they were supported
by the Richmond community to a great extent, the business community and
the newspapers?

VIRGINIUS DABNEY:

Well, I was very much criticized for it. People thought that I was some
kind of wild-eyed idealist, a balmy individual who was not aware of the
realities and "why did I keep stirring things up?" I
may be getting ahead of the story, but I first began working on
segregation on streetcars in '43. Is that too far ahead?

DANIEL JORDAN:

Well, we'll be picking it up again, but it might serve as an
illustration.

VIRGINIUS DABNEY:

Well, it does illustrate the point. Many of my friends were against that,
feeling that I was trying to change something that had been going on for
generations and that if I just wouldn't talk about it, there wouldn't be
any trouble. A friend of mine now, who is a prominent surgeon and
retired, he's in his eighties now and has now completely changed on the
race issue. At that time, he was a good friend of mine but he didn't
know what in the world had gotten into me to be stirring this thing up.
He came to see me and said, "What do you want to do this for?
You are just making things worse. If you don't write about it, it will
subside. The Negroes are perfectly content." Well, he told me
the other day, "I have changed completely my views on this
whole question."

DANIEL JORDAN:

Were you ever socially ostracized or threatened?

VIRGINIUS DABNEY:

Not really, no. I wasn't persona grata with some
people, but they didn't say anything much, they just sort of shook their
heads.

WILLIAM H. TURPIN:

How about your publisher? Any reaction from him?

VIRGINIUS DABNEY:

No, he was remarkably nice about it. What happened was that when the
papers merged, Mr. Bryan became publisher of both papers in 1940 and the
agreement was that he was not to interfere with the editorial policy of
the Times-Dispatch. You see, he had published the
News Leader over a long period. He acquiesced in that
because he thought it was desirable to have two conflicting points of
view. Nobody wanted to cook up opposing viewpoints arbitrarily, but if
the two editors were in sincere disagreement, there would be no
objection—at least within limits. Even when I broke loose on
the streetcar thing, he didn't raise any fuss. Actually, Mr. Bryan was a
liberal on the race issue.

DANIEL JORDAN:

You mentioned your surgeon friend changing his mind. I know that you were
quoted at the time of your retirement as having felt that you had become
more conservative on some questions through the years. Looking back at
the 1930's, have you changed your mind about any stands that you took
then, or if you could do it over so to speak?

VIRGINIUS DABNEY:

No, I don't think I have changed my mind in any substantial way. The
reason that I suppose I am regarded as conservative is that I really am
conservative in relation to say, Ted Kennedy, or McGovern, or Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr. These are what we call "liberal"
today. I consider myself conservative by comparison with each of them.
And I certainly vastly prefer Governor Mills Godwin to Henry Howell. I
believe that if Henry Howell were elected governor, he would do a lot of
things that are contrary to what I think is good for Virginia. He seems
to me to be demagogic and intellectually dishonest. But as for the race
problem, I am in favor of everything that I favored in 1934.